“Car companies are finally realising that what they sell is just a big computer you sit in.”

So says Kevin Tighe, a senior systems engineer at security testing firm Bugcrowd according to this Guardian article, reporting from the “car-hacking village” at this year’s Defcon, the hacker conference.

Expect more of this kind of article. Behind the chrome skin of the shiny, new, smart personal assistants may not be anything more sinister than a land-grab for personal information, but gradually (creepingly), we seem to become more vulnerable to whatever they evolve into, whether that evolution is by design, or by mistake.

We have made a Faustian pact with our technology, and with the Mephistophelian technologists and engineers (like Skull and Viktor in the book) who deliver this relentless innovation. There are already (real life) prominent scientist and engineers, like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, who are warning about the dangers of rampant Artificial Intelligence, but their warnings are about the big, apocalyptic dangers for humanity rather than the small, invidious threats which exist now, to us all, on a personal level from this technology.

Read my interview with The BookBag about my recently published novel, Smart. There’s also a link to a competition to win one of two signed copies of Smart.